7 - Alternative Theories Of Amnesia

Abstract

This chapter discusses various theories of amnesia. The oldest theory of amnesia emerged from the work of Hebb (1949), who has been credited with developing one of the first modern neurological models of memory. In his system Hebb, proposed that the brain could retain information in one of two ways: first, through the continual reverberation of a neural circuit and, second, through an actual structural change in neural patterning. Brenda Milner has been the major advocate of a consolidation deficit theory of amnesia. The retrieval-interference theory proposed by Warrington and Weiskrantz has been a major model of amnesia. According to this viewpoint, amnesic patients encode and store information in normal fashion but are unable to retrieve specific material from long term memory because of interference. Several theories of the amnesic syndrome have emphasized the alcoholic Korsakoff patients' inability to discriminate context. It has been proposed that amnesics are unable to discriminate the context in which something is learned and, consequently, are easily confused between recently presented experimental material and information acquired in the distant past. Sanders and Warrington also invoked this possibility as an attempt to explain confabulation that occurred during their retrograde amnesia experiment.